


Whom Thunder Hath Made Greater

by lasersforeyes



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Hell!Fic, M/M, Psychological Torture, Torture
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-03-18
Updated: 2013-03-18
Packaged: 2017-12-05 18:02:49
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,150
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/726220
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lasersforeyes/pseuds/lasersforeyes
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Lucifer slowly breaks Sam during their time in the Cage.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Whom Thunder Hath Made Greater

He’s been stumbling through the desert for days. The mountains and their shredding rocks are a hundred miles behind him, looming at his back, black and piercing. He refuses to look. The white sand whips around him, stinging like insects where it lashes his skin, invades his mouth and eyes though he’s desperately pulled his shirt up over his face. Through the faded, stretched green fabric, the endless world around him wavers like a blinding ocean. His breath is harsh in his ears, a guttural, dying rasp. The sand is in his lungs, burning like the sunless light that makes the desert too painful to look at. It clings to his legs, forming instantly around them when he pauses, threatening to turn him into a crumbling pillar if he doesn’t keep moving.

He lurches forward on legs that feel broken; he hasn’t properly looked at himself since the mountains, since the Rage -- it could have been a day ago or a year. Perhaps he’s been in the desert for forty years. His body is covered in wounds. Some of them, he thinks, must be pretty bad. They’ve stopped bleeding, but there is a stench that makes its way through the howling sand and sun-filled wind: a waft of unrefrigerated meat, cheese left out too long. Sometimes it’s strong enough to make him gag, but his torn and empty stomach produces nothing but a thin, black liquid.

He has to keep moving.

The Rage echoes distantly all around him, just beyond the edges of his perception. His cheeks are still sticky, he thinks, from where his eyes burst in their sockets to behold it, but somehow, he can still see. He can still hear, and breathe, and walk, too, all of which should technically be impossible. He shouldn’t even be able to exist here, but the shifting sand moves around him and he keeps going forward. If he doesn’t, reality begins to unravel, and he doesn’t know what happens then.

There are other things with him, too, sometimes. Bodiless and ethereal, they coil and undulate in the sand, shapes that are almost familiar, sounds that slowly separate themselves from the endless shriek. Voices, cries. Sometimes, he thinks he hears his brother, calling for him, his name, tattered at the edges with pain. Sometimes, he tries to call back, and the tearing sensation in his throat reminds him that he screamed his vocal chords out long ago.

Something changes; a shape snakes around his ankle, brief and pale in the swimming landscape, and he stumbles, pitching forward with one arm out to catch himself. A cramp of panic twists his stomach and clogs his throat, but the sand doesn’t swallow him as he expected. Instead, it continues to hiss around and through him, tearing at the open meat of his wounds, and his raw throat produces a moan, weak and small. His arm looks dark, burned, against the blazing brilliance of the sand, and the skin weeps thick blood and pus. He retches again, agonizingly, and in a moment of utter surrender, tries to remember how to pray.

“Sam.”

It’s the only voice that ever speaks to him here, soft and cool like an oasis to his burning ear. It carries with it an edge of thunder, and a darkness like eternal rain, and he knows that in an instant it could destroy him, like the Rage did: rip him to bloody pieces with the sheer enormity of it, but it doesn’t. It is almost gentle, and he shivers. Slowly and inevitably, he lifts his head to the dazzling light, eyes stinging.

“You can’t run from me.”

The voice sounds amused, a smiling murmur against Sam’s cheek, though the blazing chaos that is the archangel shimmers distantly on some imagined horizon. Like a vapor of flame, Lucifer’s form dances in the light, and Sam’s head aches. A caress like a watery breeze ghosts across his blistered cheek, healing the split flesh, and almost against his will, Sam leans into it, closing his eyes.

“I’m your only salvation.”

~~

He doesn’t try to stop it and he doesn’t let it happen. It just is. Hell is a place where free will has been taken away, where all possibilities have been narrowed down to the terrible, the trapped, the punishing. 

Lucifer inside him was like swallowing the sun; it was never something Sam was going to be able to speak about in words. It was having every atom of himself filled to bursting, his brain disintegrating under a vastness of knowledge he could never hope to understand. Walking around like an explosion frozen in the process. 

He misses it.

Lucifer knows this. He knows everything about Sam.

And Lucifer is nothing if not loyalty twisted by a love that could never be returned. He is an obsession and a dark amusement. He finds Sam in every corner of the vast Cage to which Sam’s bleeding mind can take him, and he strokes Sam’s hair with fingers of fire and fucks the most gaping, aching parts of him.

Sam is on his back, slowly sinking, he thinks, into some kind of water, though everything is dark and is the wrong color. His hands slip through growth that seems too quick to be plant-like, invisible slimy things that hold him in a sick caress. Lucifer leans down, dazzling wings like galaxies of light. The stars shimmer in Sam’s eyes and he stares into them, willing himself away as the archangel moves into him, through all the holes that Hell has made. Sam grits his teeth because it’s like being torn apart in slow motion, every strand of muscle shredding itself away from those next to it, every bone ponderously splintering into smaller and smaller shards, lodging in his wet and heaving organs.

Lucifer licks his pounding heart with a tongue like lava, maybe that of a lion or a bull. Sam isn’t sure. Much of the time, Lucifer transmits himself into something resembling a human being, like the vessel Nick, but sometimes he is ineffable, a jumbled collection of faces and mouths, hands, wings. This time, Sam pries his eyes open and looks up into his own face. The angel smiles with Sam’s smile and licks a hole into Sam’s chest, laving that shuddering heart with boiling saliva. Sam whimpers, the bare bones of a sound, and tries not to look into the twisted mirror, the angular features so familiar but for the abyss behind the eyesockets. His body rises against Lucifer’s weight, his fingers clutch in the slippery tendrils, and he pushes his head back under the brackish surface, hoping to drown.

He never drowns. He never burns to death, or shatters into a million pieces but that Lucifer puts him back together, easily, with barely a thought.

The thick liquid - definitely not water - slides down Sam’s throat in gentle, pulsing strokes. It pools, hot and throbbing, in his belly, squirming like a living thing, as Lucifer’s fiery hands lift his hips and Sam feels the splintering pressure of twisted grace pushing into the sweating cavern of his body. He swallows rapidly, gulping the liquid as though it were air, as though it could lift him out of this place and deliver sense to his swimming brain. It fills him until he thinks he’ll burst, and Lucifer’s heat swells his guts, punching into his splitting anus like he’s being fucked with a flamethrower. Sam tears at the growths in the water around him, and they tear back, hundreds of cold, slippery hands dragging him toward merciful oblivion. He never reaches it.

~~

The sharp spines of rocks press against his ribs. Sam is huddled in a cave in the black mountains, shaking as he feels everything around him shake, the vast and distant walls reverberating with the insurmountable power of the Rage. Just like Lucifer, the Rage is inescapable, though Sam has managed to stay far enough away that it doesn’t claim him the way it did when he first landed in the Cage. Still, it will never stop rattling in his cells, just as Lucifer will never stop finding him where he hides himself away.

When he does, Sam’s body shakes with nausea, torn between terror and relief.

The rocks heat into blistering brands against his shivering skin, and light infuses the blackness of the cave, searing. Lucifer is all around him, and stands at the entrance like a messiah that, rather than emerging from the darkness of death, is fighting his way back in.

He’s wearing Nick today, though the image is thin, like tracing paper held up to the light.

“You know,” Lucifer says, as though continuing some civil conversation of just moments ago, “you really should have thought about this whole no-way-out concept before you jumped us both into this little prison, Sammy.”

Sam shreds his fingertips on the burning stone. “Yeah. Well. You know. Me versus the whole world. Not too hard to choose.” Each word stabs his tongue like a knife and his eyes water.

“Not the whole world, Sam. Not the whole world.”

Lucifer sounds soft and sad, kneels before him and surrounds him with stifling affection. His fingertips stab under Sam’s chin and lift it to gaze into his bruised eyes. “Only the worst parts of it. Something always survives. It could have been a good thing, Sam. You and me.”

Sam’s tongue is swollen and dry now, and his skin starting to bubble. He shakes his head, but there’s little resolve in the movement. Just dumb instinct. Much the same as the instinct to tip his head and part his lips when Lucifer kisses him, burning out his skull from the inside.

“You _chose_ me, Sam. You chose _me._ ”

His voice is gentle and reverent, and Sam feels a fluttering lightness when Lucifer spreads open his ribcage, splitting liver and lungs with the sharp edge of his thumbnail and slipping a fist inside, squeezing and pumping as the wet edges of Sam’s organs suck against his iron arm, thirstily. Blood rushes through them, swelling and revitalizing them even as Sam’s shuddering body falls apart. Grace rockets into his veins like a drug, and he bucks and writhes, bloody mouth gaping, spine arching and snapping. The light gets brighter, a star falling, thrusting into every inch of him until his molecules tremble, guzzling that energy like starving things. Wet, broken cries spill limply out of him and he tries to hold onto the sensation of his body, of anything physical and real, hands grasping for Lucifer’s shoulders and finding only incinerating air.

When he comes his blood paints Lucifer’s face, dark splatters across the shining visage, but the archangel doesn’t seem to mind. The blood boils away against his smile, and his firebrand fingers press Sam’s meat back together. His kiss against Sam’s ruined throat is cold, soothing as ice. Sam freezes slowly, breath turning into snow, eyes fluttering closed with frost-thick lashes. Lucifer sinks into him and all Sam’s body can do is enfold him, blood becoming sluggish and heart stopping.

The Rage quakes far away and sends a sliver of fear darting through Sam’s darkening mind. Lucifer’s hush ignites inside the cavern. “Don’t be afraid, Sam. I will always protect you from him.”

~~

Sometimes, Sam remembers his brother, his family, and it’s then that his mind awakes screaming, and he tears his fists to bloody stumps beating at the gore-dimmed iron walls.

He’s standing in a sea of his own shit and piss, and he scarcely knows what he is anymore, except a vehicle of desperate rage. His brother’s name ricochets around his head like a bullet. Where is Dean? What is he doing? Why hasn’t he found a way to get Sam out yet? _Dean please Dean please Dean_

Until the painful begging turns to curses, foaming on his splitting lips.

_Fuck you, Dean, you fuck! You useless fucking piece of shit! Fuck you! Dean! Please!_

“Stop it!”

The roar of the archangel’s voice makes him cower, ears bleeding. Lucifer fills the space to capacity and further, wings flared in anger.

“He’s not going to get you out, Sam. He can’t. _You_ made sure of that. We are trapped here. For eternity. Do you know what eternity is, Sam?”

_Fuck you fuck you fuck you fuck you fuck --_

“Because you will.”

And Lucifer rams himself down Sam’s throat with no mercy, fist tearing a hole right through Sam’s heaving chest. This time, there is no reverence as he takes him, living spears of burning metal like the ramrods of cannons fucking into Sam’s eyes, his mouth and open wounds. The air is thick with sulfur and he chokes, dying in his own vomit again and again.

~~

From the catwalk of the tilting tower, Sam can see the white and gold lightning boiling in the density of dark air on the far horizon. It arcs madly across the vast dome of the Cage, seeking a way out, finding none. The power of it lifts the hairs on Sam’s arms. 

The tower is an illusion, even in a place of illusions. Lucifer made it from fragments of both of their minds, and locked Sam inside of it, presumably for his own amusement. Every scratch that Sam makes to mark the passage of some completely arbitrary span of time only erases itself as soon as he’s done. His skin is tight on his bones, his stomach clinging to itself with hunger. The deep cuts on his pale arms tell him he’s been drinking his own blood to slake his thirst. Sam wonders how that’s been going.

The tower is round and slanted and has a single room, a dark dome supported by arches that leave his view unobstructed. In the center of the stone floor is a chain, and attached to that chain, a manacle big enough to fit around a human neck. Sam has steadfastly ignored it for the entirety of his time here. He knows what Lucifer wants.

What Sam wants is to drink the rain, but it’s acidic and burns holes in his mouth when he tries.

Sam wonders how his own flesh would taste, and if there would even be any point in eating yourself. He pictures himself as a human ouroboros, mouth around his own limbs, spinning in a circle as he tries to swallow himself. The image imprints brightly on his brain and spins and spins as he sinks down against one of the damp arches with his arms hugged tight around him. 

Pretty soon, he starts to laugh, and the laughs sound like he’s coughing up rocks. Sam crawls to the center of the room and latches the manacle around his neck.

In an hour, or a day, or a month, Lucifer arrives, the sun sundering the heavens, banishing the acid rain. Sam stretches skeletal limbs out on the floor and grins hatefully.

Lucifer’s lion eyes are soft, a burning golden amber, and he pads into the chamber, pressing his nose against Sam’s crackling bones. His wings sweep and enfold, and when they settle behind his sleek human back, Sam is lying on pillows of gold. “Fuck yourself,” Sam croaks. His hand lifts weakly, and he watches as twisted fingers stroke the burnished gold of Lucifer’s cheek.

Lucifer breathes into him the food of the gods, and Sam gulps greedily, teeth snapping and lips sucking at the angel’s tongue, inhaling a thickness of heat and time and simmering anger until he’s gagging full of it, ribs pushing at his skin where they must stretch around his stomach. Lucifer leans above him, pale and sleek as a Greek statue, his cock stabbing at Sam’s gut, making him groan into the stream of Lucifer’s breath. He squirms, the collar around his throat pressing into his skin with every swallow, but Lucifer doesn’t allow him to stop. With a ruthless calm force, he expands into Sam until Sam is pregnant with that twisted grace, the gravid truth of their captivity, the inexorable horror of Lucifer’s love.

Sam feels like he’ll explode, but the pain is focused this time, roiling in his distended gut, and he grips Lucifer’s hard shoulders and moans into the archangel’s mouth. Lucifer breaks the terrible kiss, finally, and flips him over as though Sam weighs nothing, letting him gasp and gag on his hands and knees, feeling bile rise in his constricted throat. Human hips thrust sharply against his backside, cold as marble, and Lucifer pushes his cock slowly into Sam, jarring his bloated insides as his grace forces more of himself, more of that fluid, heavy reality, into Sam’s helpless belly. 

Sam’s eyes burn, and for a moment he can see the breadth and extent of the Cage, of Hell itself, every dark corner and twisted spire, the bars of their imprisonment and the seething, pulsing world beyond. He sees to the horizons where the impotent and desolate Rage of an archangel trapped in a world not his own flares and beats and begs for his father to save him. Sam laughs, then, sorrowfully, at Michael’s pain, at the creature with a heart more terrible than a hundred suns who cannot escape the love and hatred of his own brother. Lucifer arches against him, and Sam’s sides flare and ache with a pain like the stab of a hot knife. His laughter chokes off in a sickening gurgle, and as Lucifer climaxes inside him in a nuclear blast, hot wet vomit streams from Sam’s mouth like an unending river.

~~

He floats distantly in a passive, dark ocean.

Deep below him, everything trembles like someone moaning in sorrow, but Sam feels wonderfully blank. He has even forgotten the name that used to torment him to insanity, and when Lucifer’s wings rise up and enfold him, he sucks the pinions greedily and lets himself be entered.

~~

A star falls through the brazen dome of the Cage’s sky. Sam looks up.

It is an increasingly rare moment, when Lucifer is not with him. Sam aches emptily, sitting in the desert and waiting. He has been waiting for a long time, but the concept of time is erased the moment it enters his head. His tongue bleeds still where Lucifer bit it out, his ribs creak where Lucifer has stitched him back together. 

The sand swirls around him like a living thing and the star falls before him, staggering to its feet, obliterating light with its light, sense with everything that can be sensed. Its wings are dark, but contain universes and Sam blinks at the sudden intrusion of contrast, of light and dark and the scent of something of earth-- high alpine meadows or an ocean wind. Something about it seems terrifyingly familiar, and it speaks with a voice grating and painful, but full of command.

“Sam Winchester, come with me. There is little time.”

And Sam has been waiting, so he goes.


End file.
